Newcastle warned: Don't expect Everton to be tired

Oct 7 2007 by Nick Smith, Liverpool Daily Post

DAVID MOYES is confident his squad  will have recovered from their European excursion in time to cement their top five position at Newcastle United this afternoon.

Thursday night’s dramatic UEFA Cup first round success against Metalist Kharkiv was Everton’s third victory in succession and secured them a place in the group stages of the UEFA Cup for the first time.

But after arriving back from Ukraine at 5am on Friday following a delayed flight, the players had little recovery time before resuming training in preparation for the 3pm kick-off at St James’s Park today.

Manager Moyes, however, insists they won’t need much lifting after securing a 3-2 win on the night to complete a 4-3 aggregate success.

“The players are buoyant,” said Moyes. “We’ve prepared very well, the trip away was done first class from start to finish and, but for delay on the way back, it couldn’t have gone any better to plan.

“So we hope that preparation does help. It’s already helped us get one result and hopefully it will help us towards getting a result against Newcastle.”

And with a guaranteed two further away trips in Europe in the coming weeks, Moyes expects to see a number of key players complete their recoveries from injury in order to boost his squad numbers.

His first hope is to welcome back Andrew Johnson as the striker faces further assessment on the groin strain that kept him out of the victory in Kharkiv – but he will be one of many Moyes will be relying on when the heavy schedule kicks in.

“We know how it comes Thursday-Sunday in this competition and we know we have to do that, so that’s why we’ve tried to get a bigger squad,” Moyes said.

“Hopefully over the next couple of weeks or so we’ll start to see the return of Tim Cahill, James Vaughan and possibly Tommy Gravesen so by the end of the international break there’s a good chance we will be much closer to getting everyone in the squad back fit.

“I feel that we’re getting through without feeling that we’ve hit top form yet. There’s been signs and periods in the last couple of games that we’re beginning to get a little bit better but we know that we are still looking to get to what we consider as fully on song.

“(The win) will be a big boost because something we’ve never really done well is get through the first round of a cup competitions so we’ve got ourselves through and we will be able to utilise the squad and see how people do.

“But I’m looking forward to the challenge we’ve got.”

The draw for the group stages of the UEFA Cup takes place on Tuesday in Nyon, Switzerland.

The 40 teams will be drawn into eight groups of five while there will be five groups of eight teams in each pot based on their club coefficients.

Everton are in pot three, which means they cannot face Spartak Moscow, Galatasaray, Atletico Madrid, Fiorentina, Sporting Braga, Getafe and Stade Rennais. But that still leaves teams like Bayern Munich or Bayer Leverkusen as well as Villarreal, their Champions League conquerors of two years ago.

Everton know they can’t be grouped with the other two remaining English clubs, Bolton and Spurs.

After the initial euphoria of Thursday night’s rousing second-half performance, Moyes was able to give a more considered verdict on his side’s achievement in finally securing some European progress.

“The win is not as significant as maybe a lot of people would put it,” he added.

“Let’s be fair, we’ve won a qualifier of the UEFA Cup and that’s all that was. My ambitions are to try and go on and get to a final so if that was the height of what I thought was the top then it wouldn’t be very high.

“To put it into perspective, the importance of the game was we wanted to get through.

“To everybody it looked a pretty easy game on paper but it turned out to be far from that.”